I have a string like this stored in mysql table:
?name1=value1&name2=value2&name3=value3
originally this data was only going to be used to send GET data to another script but now i find myself needing it for other things.
is there a predefined function in PHP for turning these pairs into variable or an array? or will I have to do it manually?
The (poorly-named) PHP function parse_str can do this, though you will need to first trim off the initial question mark.
$arr = array();
parse_str($str, $arr);
print_r($arr);
There are some caveats to this function alluded to in the manual page:
magic_quotes_gpc setting affects how this function operates, since this is the routine used internally by PHP to decode query strings and urlencoded POST bodies.If you need a portable solution that is not affected by the magic_quotes_gpc setting then it's reasonably straightforward to write a decoding function manually, using urldecode to handle the value encoding:
function parseQueryString($queryString) {
$result = array();
$pairs = explode("&", $queryString);
foreach ($pairs as $pair) {
$pairArr = split("=", $pair, 2);
$result[urldecode($pairArr[0])] = urldecode($pairArr[1]);
}
return $result;
}
This solution will probably be slightly slower than the built-in parse_args function, but has the benefit of consistent behavior regardless of how PHP is configured. Of course you will again need to first strip off the ? from the beginning, which is not included in either example.
